Musical Gatherings

I am an orchestral conductor with no live concerts to prepare for. On March 10, I finished a series of four performances of Vern Griffith’s Wall-to-Wall Percussion show with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, where I am Assistant Conductor. Over the course of a few days, more than 5000 students, teachers, and families had gathered to laugh and learn about percussion instruments in a crowded concert hall, while I led the orchestra through music by John Williams, Modest Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. At this point, there were no cases of Covid-19 in Manitoba, and none of us realised it would be our final concert together for many months. It was only a few days later that the first case of the novel coronavirus was detected in the province, and one by one, my upcoming concerts—operas, pops concerts, and student performances—began to be cancelled. I do not know when I will next stand on a podium facing a live symphony orchestra.

I am not doing the things that, in ordinary times, define my job, and yet those around me keep reminding me that my profession as a musician is still valuable. Friends and family tell me how much joy they derive from Yo Yo Ma’s #songsofcomfort and the Berlin Philharmonic’s broadcasts and families posting home performance videos on YouTube. I am the music director of Sistema Winnipeg, a social programme that provides free, daily after-school music lessons to kids in some of the city’s least resourced communities. Our students tell us that they’re bored, lonely, confused, and afraid, but that playing their instruments offers entertainment, solace, community, and routine. In New York, musicians perform for coronavirus patients using cell phones; in Italy, videos of amateur singers belting opera on their balconies quickly go viral. Music has the ability to fill so many of our essential needs—to strengthen our capacity to listen and make us feel heard, to expand our imaginations and create a blueprint for better worlds, to nourish our sense of community and bring new people together.

Yet, as I reflect further on the capacity of music to provide for our needs, I am not convinced that listening to music alone is enough to satisfy. Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you.” For Le Guin, the satisfaction provisions offer is not only in the needs that they fulfil but also in the gathering itself, and in the vessel in which they are contained. For anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, “the earliest cultural device was probably a recipient.”

There is a tremendous impulse towards creation right now, and I am grateful for all the incredible artists and musicians making inspiring, urgent, and beautiful new work and performances from their homes in these difficult times. Just as urgent as the creation of new work, however, is the opportunity to collect and gather existing work: whether to consume it, to share it, or to store it for later. “If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you,” writes Le Guin—the same is true of art, and the curation of music allows it to provide us with long-lasting sustenance.